Various convergence services have been made and developed due to the multiplied burden of communication expenses and the development of wired and wireless communication technologies pursuant to deepened competition of communication markets, deterioration in profitability, and diversified consumer requirements.
In particular, the trend of communication markets being a fixed mobile convergence (FMC) becomes a new paradigm where existent subscribers are prevented from seceding and new services are made. The femtocell technology is representative of the FMC. The femtocell refers to a very small scale cell, and a femto base station is installed indoors, mainly at the inside of a common house.
The femtocell has a coverage with a radius of 10 m or less. The femtocell widens the indoor coverage and enhances the communication quality so as to efficiently provide various fixed mobile convergence services. Furthermore, the femtocells are much differentiated in capacity and performance depending upon the wireless access technologies used, which mainly include wireless broadband internet (WiBro), wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA), a global system for mobile communications (GSM), and a system of 3G long term evolution (LTE).
Assuming that a plurality of femtocells (ranging from several tens to several hundreds) are deployed within a macrocell while just applying a handoff method of the existent wireless access technology to the macrocell environment with the femtocell deployments, the femtocells increase in number, and accordingly, the neighbor cells also increase in number so that the power consumption required for the relevant terminal to scan all the base stations is increased. Further, the data transmission and reception are delayed due to the increased scanning time. In addition, the message that the base station in the macrocell broadcasts for communicating with the terminal is large so that the overhead becomes excessively enlarged.
For these reasons, it is required to manage a neighbor list of neighboring base stations based on the location of a terminal such that the cell selection and the handoff should be efficiently conducted under the environments deployed with femtocells.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.